Open any trade publication and you’ll find an avalanche of advice telling leaders to “lean into AI.” It’s no surprise that sales teams want to enhance CRM data with AI-driven insights.
AI can quickly analyze customer data, spot patterns, and reveal opportunities sales teams might otherwise miss. It’s already proving to be a force multiplier: guiding recommendations, informing pricing, and helping reps prioritize the right actions.
Better decision-making is especially important to the more than 60% of respondents in the recent 2025 State of Distributors Sales survey, a collaboration with Distribution Strategy Group, who said their top sales challenge was protecting margins and pricing effectively.
However, there’s a disconnect: While many businesses claim to have adopted CRM, only 15% say their sales processes are truly digital and data-driven.
That’s a problem.
If your existing CRM data is fragmented, inconsistent, stale or missing, adding AI to the mix won’t fix it. It will expose weaknesses faster. AI is a mirror. It amplifies what already exists, magnifying inaccuracies throughout the business and directly affecting your customers’ experience.
When companies try to bolt AI onto a CRM full of bad data, they typically pay a financial and operational price.
- Financial: wasted technology spend, bad forecasting, missed opportunities and higher customer acquisition costs.
- Operational: low user adoption, sales process breakdowns, and opportunity blind spots.
How to prepare your CRM for AI
Before even thinking about AI, you need to get your house in order.
Take a hard look at your CRM. Where do gaps in process, visibility, or discipline exist? Many organizations have strong documentation on the back end of the sales cycle—quotes, orders, transactions—but very little structure on the front end. Are you tracking data consistently in the lead and opportunity stages? Do you even know what your pipeline really looks like?
Take a look under the hood. If your foundational data is messy or incomplete, no AI tool can save you. AI is only as smart as the information you feed it.
Before incorporating AI, I recommend leaders:
- Invest in CRM hygiene. Standardize field names, remove duplicates, normalize accounts and contracts, and establish clear rules for data entry and validation.
- Develop a clean hierarchical data structure. This allows AI to apply logic like the 80/20 principle and surface high-value accounts or customer groups.
- Create accurate parent–child relationships. These are essential for analyzing revenue, buying patterns, and cross-sell potential across related entities—while enabling better roll-up reporting and automation triggers.
- Establish consistent product taxonomy. If part numbers or attributes are inconsistent, recommendation engines can’t find accurate matches. AI needs to “see” your catalog clearly.
- Automate repeatable processes. Structured workflows improve predictability and reduce manual error.
- Extend CRM across the full customer lifecycle. AI’s greatest value is predictive—but only when it has visibility from lead to renewal.
Think of CRM and AI the same way you think of giving a rep a target list. You wouldn’t hand a salesperson a sloppy, outdated “go list” and expect strong results. AI is no different.
When your CRM data is structured, standardized, and trusted, AI becomes an accelerator—improving forecasting, surfacing hidden opportunities, predicting churn, and helping teams protect margins.
If you want AI to deliver meaningful insights and measurable growth, start with the foundation. Get your data house in order first. Only then can AI help you make smarter decisions and drive sustained sales performance.
Brian Gardner, the founder of SalesProcess360, is the author of CEO for CRM: Your Roadmap for CRM Success, a guide to putting the right people and processes in place for long-term CRM adoption. Brian served as a sales manager for a major regional industrial distribution rep company for 15 years before building Selltis, an industrial sales team CRM solution with roots in process improvement. He took his passion for sales process improvement to the speaking and coaching world with SalesProcess360. He is also a frequent guest speaker on CRM at Texas A&M University’s Industrial Distribution department and the LSU Professional Sales Institute. Reach him at brian.gardner@salesprocess360.com.